>> did i get it right? >> close. >> all right. the president and ceo of faith links inc. she served as manager of federal affairs for the new england council, the nation's oldest regional business organization where she advocated for the interest of over 350 businesses across a six-state new england region in washington, d.c. where she worked. her areas of responsibility were health care, and she also was the special assistant to our very own vice chair of the democratic caucus, john larson of connecticut. she earned a bachelor's degree in political science from southern connecticut state university and a masters degree in religious studies with a concentration in religion, ethics and public policy from howard university school of did i vin at this. she is also an instructor at the calvary bible institute where she teaches a course on faith and politics.

next we have cindy smalls. cindy smalls is the national voter protection manager for the aflcio working in the political department overseeing the 2012 my vote, my right to voter protection campaign. prior to coming to the aflcio cindy worked for seiu from 2007 to 2012 and in various capacities as the mid-atlantic area political director, senior legislative advocate and coordinating manager overseeing seiu's retiree problem and as a field director for the south carolina democratic party and provided technical assistance to candidates for city council, mayor and school board and has a ba from the university of south carolina. marcus mason is a partner at the madison group. he is responsible for managing the firm's transportation, energy, tax and homeland security portfolio. in addition, he focuses on crisis management, complex

integrated campaigns and coalition building. he has more than 15 years of political and policy experience. prior to joining tmg he served as amtrak's senior director of government affairs. a member of the board of directors of the black caucus foundation and on the political action committee and also a published author who writes spy thrillers which i just found out. next we have my home boy, jeff johnson. jeff is an award-winning journalist, social activist and political commentator and author. from his celebrated conversations with marquise world figures in the political business and entertainment arenas to his grassroots trench work to inspire the next generation of leaders, investigative journalist, political correspondent and activist, jeff johnson continues to be a trailblazing social entrepreneur and authentic voice

for change. currently jeff is an msnb krmplt contributor and executive editor of politic 365. he is a weekly commentator on the tom joiner morning show and chairman and ceo of the jeff johnson institute for urban development currently leading a five year project to recruit and develop 80,000 black male teachers. he has earned a reputation as a voice of conscience. we are pleased to have all of our panelists. please give them all a round of applause. my first question is as martin luther king junior talked about the war in vietnam, he asked the question, and i ask this question because i believe we are at war today, he said there comes a time when silence is betrayal.

oftentimes members of the faith community hold politics and politicians at arm's length and choose not to engage in the process. how do we remind the especially younger generation of faith leaders about the black church's historical connection to politics and social change and motivate them to act? the floor is open. anyone that would like to answer. >> i will start. i think. i think that many in this room are very clear on the fact that there has been a considerable shift as it relates to national faith leadership and their ability to be apolitical versus political, and that shift has happened, one, because of in many cases what you all have been discussing for the last hour which is the irs attack on those that would attempt to be political and focused losing

status, but i think that one of the challenges in young leadership being able to model not just what dr. king was about but the legacy that i think comes from the black church in particular and that's using the voice to speak to issues beyond this that of church, to that of life, and because in many cases they don't always see it, and i think that there is a great deal of discussion about the legacy of the church as it relates to social political issues and the ability to be able to mobilize around them and not a lot of modeling, and so until that modeling happens, it doesn't exist and we can have a lot of re tore call discussion about it, but i will close with this. i think the whole notion of this discussion here is call to action. when you say call and action, that implies there is an ask and a response. in the middle of that there has

to be training. i think one of the things that we have removed from the african-american institutional tradition is an emphasis on training and by that i mean not the thee logical training that comes from seminary from the standpoint of being able to be a pastor within a denomination but the training of what it means to be a grassroots organizer utilizing the proceed fet i can voice to mobilize folks with a level of proficiency, not just passion, and one of the with things that frustrates me is that we put an over emphasis on passion and under emphasis on direction and focus. so i think that there is a tremendous opportunity and many of your churches are doing this, but i think there are too many that are not and i think there needs to be an institutionalized process that puts us in a position where we're seeing not just young faith leaders but congregants trained proficiently on how to do social justice

activism so when they're coming out of our houses of faith it is not just with passion and not just with vision but with proficien proficiency, focus, a strategy connected to it, measurable goals associated with it, data collected as a result of it and at the end of the day we're able to say here is what was accomplished as a result of our congregants going into the local community and addressing these issues to the goal of creating this result, not just speaking exciting people to a state of you for i can inactivity where they jump up and down and did the same thing we did before we started talking and no transform active change. >> thank you. >> amen. >> amen. >> i think another piece to connect to that and i think one of the things that jeff said that was so significant was about really connecting it to something that makes sense for people in their every day lives. there is a disconnect for many, especially from our generations between the impact of policy and

what it means in the hood, what it means on our block, and so we're talking about policy issues. we're talking about legislative issues, but they're not seeing how policy impacts where they live. there is a need if we're going to be able to do it and shape it is to show the connection between policy and where people live and their every day life, not just that but heen a historical reflection on what we have right now is a lot of -- and i love the boomer generation. i love the generation above it, but we have a lot of historical reflection and back padding and that kind of piece but this generation needs to see and really grab ahold of what those policy changes did to impact their current lifestyle and there needs to be a way to shape that in a way that -- let me give you an example from a biblical sense since we have preachers in here, we tell them what it was like for a generation across the red sea but they're in the wilderness wearing hand medowns, and so

they're hearing the victories in the past and in the wilderness wearing hand me downs trying to figure out what they're going to do when they face the walls of jericho. there is a need to show the same tactics used at the red sea helpful to the one get them out of the wilderness and, two, to be able to tear down the walls of jericho and get them into the promised land living and if you don't make the connection all they see is wilderness and hand me downs and all they see is making not just to make it today but they don't see how to move forward to make it tomorrow and all they hear is giants in the land. >> all right. i will take a brief pause. i indicated to you that we would be joined by my colleague and friend representative maxine waters from california who has now joined us and all of you know congresswoman maxine waters. i also want to recognize terry

sewell, representative out of alabama. terry joined us as well. and to draw your attention to the congressional black caucus voter empowerment program which all of you, i don't know if you have, but if you don't, please make sure you take this when you leave. this is all a part of our call to action this afternoon. the next question, just see if you can help me understand and articulate for the audience the message that we are hearing. what is the message we are hearing today with this resurgence of voter suppression and what message is being communicated to our communities and how can we counteract the message being sent by the passage of these laws? anybody? it is open. it is open to any person on the panel. go ahead, congresswoman.

>> i just ask if she would give me a little breathing room. i just came in. let me take this opportunity to thank all of our clergy, our ministers, our pastors here in washington, d.c., at this conference and the fact that you are taking time out from your schedule to talk about how you can use your power and your influence to impact the politics of this nation on behalf of not only the president of the united states but for all people who should be involved in voting and this democracy without participation there will be no democracy. i am very pleased that you see this as a part of your responsibility and something that you can have great influence with. now, having said that, i want to

point to something, a conversation that i just had with reverend jesse jackson. reverend jesse jackson has played an interesting role in the politics of this country for many years, particularly registering young people to vote and registering large numbers of people to vote for years now, and he has an interesting way of connecting with young people. i find myself sometimes feeling as if i am talking at young people rather than connecting with them, but in this conversation that i had with him recently, i better understood why he connects. when he talked to young people, he talked about trayvon martin, and he wanted to know what they cared about, what they understood, what they knew. they were all fired up.

trayvon had been killed. they knew the circumstances of the killing, and they were mad and they wanted to do something. then reverend asked how many people were registered to vote. so i guess less than half of them were actually registered to vote. then reverend jackson said, well, if you were asked to serve on the jury to make a decision about whether or not trayvon martin had been murdered, had been killed, and deserved to be punished, if you are not registered to vote, you couldn't serve on the jury. they said what? no. and then he laid it out and he explained it to them, that in order to serve on a jury you have to be registered to vote. they didn't know that. that connected in a way that

most of us don't often understand how to make that connection. we preach about the way it used to be. we preach about what they ought to know and what they ought to understand and how it was and my kids saying in the olden days, the civil rights movement and they look at us and they're not always connecting. when you can take something that is going on in their lives and connect it in a very graphic way, then this he began to get it. so i think as we talk on this panel about what you just asked us to do and how do you connect, how do you get the message across, we do have to understand that we have to pay attention to what it is that young people are listening to or what they care about, and we have to get -- and i am sure someone may have talked already or will be talking about social media and how it works and i bet many of

you have not thought about what a role you can play with the social media and we can take a lesson from president obama and what he did with the social media, how you raise money, how you organize, and you will be surprised with many of our young people they don't read the newspapers. they flip past what's going on on the news. they're on the internet. they get their information from the blogging and the tweeting. guess what? one minister out about his business tweeting to thousands with the message could do more than i dare not say on sunday morning in pulpit because you won't like it if i say that, however, you can connect and talk to people on your own time all during the day and in the evening and guess what?

as you build that following, it becomes broader than the church population because it multiplies, and so i hope that we can get into a little bit of that today because i think that perhaps the power and influence of the church still is not being utilized. it is under utilized, perhaps not understood, and i see jefferson back there just shaking his head because i think he understands something about telecommunications and all of that. with that i will turn it back over. >> thank you very much. we are going to get into that subject. ms. smalls. >> what i wanted to just address on the question that you asked around what is the message with all of these voter suppression bills we're seeing passed in these various states, what's the message, and coming from a labor perspective, this is an attack on working people in this

country. we as laborers went through in 2011, starting in 2010, the attack on working people around collective bargaining, and we view this as one more fight that we are trying to combat, and we are in a war and the message is is an attack on working people, how do we combat that? it is with the people in this room that we have to not voices. we are the ones who have organized. we are the ones who have protested in the streets, and we have to get back to that. we have to create a message that resonates not only to the older folks but the young generation. we have to connect in a way and in a way that they understand. we have to tell the story about how we came over but we have not yet come over because we still have a lot to do. there is a lot of work to be done, and so all of the rights that we have enjoyed as citizens in this country and around

collective bargaining and the basic right to vote, it is under attack, and that is the message. we are under attack. so the message is we must rise up as one like we did in wisconsin and ohio and those fights and we have to come together and tell the story that we will not lay down, that we will be in the streets, we will be on the internet. we will tweet. we will be on msnbc and cnn to tell the story, but it starts here by us raising our voices. >> thank you. mr. mason. >> i am just going to follow up on what my dear friend cindy said but first i want to clarify the record. as the congressman was reading my bioi noticed the wrong biowas being read. i am a man of many political hats as some of my friends have said, but i would not be here were it not for a black minister who was the son of another black

minister who were both elected officials. walter tucker iii empowered me as a 21-year-old to run his campaign for congress, and just a few months after he empowered me, we won that campaign for congress, so i have been in politics for about oh, lord, i don't want to say it. i have been in politics half my life. i started off running congressional campaigns, and i have never lost a campaign that i have actually managed, but interestingly enough at 21 a black minister empowered me and the black church was key to that election victory. it was critical to that election victory. when that african-american minister empowered me, i went to the ministers and the congressional district and asked them to empower one young person in the church that could be a liaison that i could use to help organize and turn out a number of key votes, but i want to get

back to the question, what message is being sent? what message is being sent to our young people by the new voter i.d. laws because it wasn't something i had election. i have a 19-year-old daughter who is a rising junior at howard university. and as fathers of daughters know, sometimes they will come to you and say very prophetic things. after watching the news -- after watching the news coverage of the assault of the -- of the assault on women's rights and female reproductive rights and the assault on voter i.d. -- and the assault on voter rights my daughter came into me and she said something that i did not expect her to say. she said, dad, it seems to me like we won the battle but someone wants to make sure that we lose the war. and that is the message that's being sent to our young people with these new voter i.d. laws. we won the battle with the passage of all the civil rights act and voting rights acts. we won the battle every year every time we get the voting rights act funded and

reauthorized. however, someone sat back after 2008 where there were 5 million new voters registered. 4 million of which were african-american. someone said, it's time for them to lose the war and let's begin -- let's put in place a strategy, and execute the tactics that will cause them to lose the war. and let's catch them flat-footed while they are cheering and celebrating. let's catch them flat-footed and implement this right now. so we have to -- we have to fight back. and i was always taught that not only do you choose your battles but you also choose the fields on which you can fight. and you choose those fields on which you can win. now i am here as the treasurer of the protecting our vote superpac which was a superpac we stood up in two months. we did in two months what the other side had two years to do. we stood up in two months and

now we're ready to roll. we are choosing our battle, and we are choosing the field on which we fight. now you can't match them dollar for dollar. you can't match them in an air campaign. but you can match them in a ground campaign. our strength and the strength of the black church has been on the ground. they have been able to put boots on the ground and win by going house -- by going door to door, block to block, precinct to precinct until you ultimately have a district or a county swinging in one direction. that's something that we have to remember and even though these -- and even though these laws have been enacted in several states, we have to get back off of our heels, get back on the balls of our feet, lean forward into this fight and engage because if we don't, if we don't, the gains of 2006 and 2008 will have been for naught. and that means that the gains

that the gains of everyone who fought before us, long before i was alive, will have been for naught. we may have won the battle, but the message that is being sent is you will -- not you might, but you will lose the war. and that is a very powerful psychological message to our young people. we have to reverse that. >> thank you. go ahead. >> in response to your question on how do we counteract the message that we're getting, that marcus so eloquently summed up, i think what we have to do is focus on the education piece and i came across an interesting stat earlier today that says 61% of all african-americans say that houses of worship should express their views on social and political issues. now that is compelling to me because i'm not sure how many faith leaders understand that

that's the case. so what we need to be doing is, in addition to talking to our ko congregations about what the issues are, we need to engage the outside on where we stand on certain issues. so we need to be in the social media outlets, be on the forefront saying this is our stance on this issue. we don't agree with it or we do agree with it depending on what the issue is and we need to make sure that we're heard. we can't shy away from that. so i think in order to counteract, you know, what we're hearing from the opposite end, we need to be as forceful as they are in expressing where we are on an issue. >> thank you very much. i think probably all of us know how low down these people are that we deal with out here. you know, this is -- when we voted four years ago, it was historic. and everybody wanted to be a part of history. but we have to make people

understand today is that now it is personal. we have a personal stake in what goes on. so my question really kind of becomes, how do we get past the point of just complaining about what someone has done to us? we know that in every single congressional district throughout this country that black vote can make or break an election. we know that, and everybody else knows it. that's why all of these laws have been passed. but also, i wonder at some point, are we really still relevant? because you look at 2010 and you see what we did. and i have people now telling me, well, it's not really going to make any difference. my life didn't change. what i don't understand and maybe you can help you figure out how we get to people who probably need more than anybody else, the people who need to vote the most are the people who vote the least. how do we encourage them to take ownership in the political process without having to literally go to their house, put them in a car, take them to the

polls, tell them how to vote. how do we get them to understand that it is in their interest, in their best interest to vote? >> i think reverend lee talked about it a little bit earlier and i think congresswoman waters mentioned it. it's about being rel vent with our messaging and making sure we're connecting. what your angry with to someone in office or someone having to responsibility to deal with it. but i think one of the things that is really not necessarily a 2012 proposition but a post-2012 proposition is we keep playing checkers and everybody else is playing chess. and we want to talk about folks being engaged in the process when we haven't been engaged in the process. and so being engaged and exciting people about the electoral process is by making sure people are engaged when there's not an election taking

place. and the ways to do that is through institutional infrastructure. and so i think we talk good game about counterbalancing the folks that we're going against, but they invest in their institutions. and so what i mean by that is, all of us have seen a fight in the community, right? you've seen something go down in the community. and sometimes you can get big brother to help you out. sometimes you have to go home to get daddy because sometimes only daddy is going to fix it. and we keep trying to have big brother organizations do what daddy institutions are supposed to do. and by that, i mean if we're going to be serious about playing politics, then we have to be able to create the kind of institutional infrastructure that has the ability to counteract what their institutions do. and so you can't have local churches counterbalancing what multimillion-dollar national

institutions do. that's not our job. that's not the local church's job. the local church has a job to do, and it has the ability to be able to excite and galvanize and organize and even train. but at some point, we need focus institutions whose job it is to do policy work. to do training work. to do organizing work. and whether that's investing in focus work with the naacp and urban league and existing institutions or whether that's about developing new institutions, until we get to the point where we're utilizing resources to be able to develop the kind of institutions that can counterbalance the heritage foundation and the religious right and show that there is a black religious organized political force where you don't have to risk your 501c3 because you developed a 501c4 that's got sensibleities from a faith perspective to be able to battle those institutions that you are fighting against. until we do that, we continue to try to get to the end and say

king me. i'm the chief negro that's speaking more than anybody and they are like checkmate. you've been playing the wrong game. let's get to the point where we -- this is not a 2012 conversation. i think the 2012 conversation is about how do we begin to develop the local agendas that says how do we educate folks around voter i.d.? how do we educate people around their rights and voter disenfranchisement? how do people know all the information on the ballot, not just who is running for president? make sure all those folks are registered to vote and that we utilize our infrastructure to get those people to the polls. that's a 2012 conversation. but a 2014, 2016 conversation is about how can the churches in my state begin to organize to help develop institution with people already in the state traemting to develop them to begin to say if i'm in the state of california, how do i begin to make sure that my congresswoman ar